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In the 1stblog in the series, an overview was shared of the journey to managed enterprise IoT, which we divide into three levels of maturity. In my second post you will learn more about the first level: Enabling the use case.

Once you have determined the IoT use case you need to ensure that the solution is secure, accurate and predictable – i.e. it delivers sustainable value – in the face of increasing quality of devices, edges, continuous data flows, and technologies. This is enabled through ‘non-functional requirements’ (NFRs) and spans both execution qualities and evolution qualities. This is going ‘beyond the use case’.

By focusing on ‘how’ the use case is delivered, instead of ‘what’, you can realize the following benefits:

Quality: If your products and services cannot extract value, the data, and opportunities, it is lost.

Risk: Complex IoT use cases can put business continuity at risk; reduce it through strong NFRs.

Productivity: A use case has little value if it stops working after 6 months or in peak load periods.

Future-proofing: Your system should be built for low cost and simple improvements / evolution.

Realizing this require you to define, discuss, document, and design your NFRs as you enable the use case and beyond it. Extending the timeline from the previous post, the following activities take around 12-24 months:

Project: Design solution, install and implement IoT solution from core to edge, integrate into your existing business systems as well as ensure system security – including building ecosystem of partners.

Business Platform: Scale-up and industrialize the use case to a full platform, do further roll-outs, integrate into your existing business and enhance parts of the system to delivery sustainable value.

Below is a non-exhaustive list of topics and example questions to be considered for NFRs:

NFR

Topic

Example Questions

Execution

Availability

Does your E2E use case need an operational uptime of 99.99% or 95%?

Continuity

What are you E2E RTO/RPO? What are the business impact / cost of your use cases being down for 1 or 60 minutes? How does this impact backup or disaster recovery? How do you enable HA, backup or disaster recovery in a distributed architecture?

Manageability

How will you update millions of devices? When and how to push new functionality? How to handle a million+ devices all calling home sick? Will you have 24×7 operations?

Interoperability

How will data be handled across different silos? Do your platforms work together?

Performance

How quickly do you need to access the data? Does it need to be processed at edge?

Resilience

How will the system do backups and ensure service continuity? How will you ensure high uptime of distributed architecture? How will errors be handled ‘gracefully’?

Security

How will data from connected objects be trusted? How will you ensure security in new and high risk environments? How will you reduce attack surface? How will you ensure internal and external compliance, auditability as well as alignment to standards?

Usability

How will you reduce the head count of managing such E2E complexity? How will you optimize latency issues to improve real-time outcomes and / or use experience?

Evolution

Maintainability

How will defects be corrected? Will the system and components have self-healing? How will uptime be ensured without sending people / parts onsite?

Modularity

Will your system be built on principles of separate independent functionality?

Scalability

Will it scale up/down to meet peak demands?

By focusing on ‘how’ you enable value from and not just ‘what’ the use case is you will derive much greater long term value for your business. To do this, you need to define, discuss, document and design them into the use case from the start. If you are not already doing this I suggest you look at facilitating it as soon as possible.

I have spoken to many clients who have rolled out IoT solutions which are ‘the future of the businesses’. It is therefore unfortunate when they stop working effectively or if the operations team only know of problems when they are informed by the customer. It is normally at this point that they ask for expertise on going ‘beyond the use case’. A few common outcomes are re-building the app, creating a new platform, facilitating rapid scalability or enabling an operations team with E2E monitoring; either way, it costs time and money that were not predicted in the business case.

A lot has been said about the data-driven economy we live in and its effects on the people, processes, places and products of all businesses, but how many companies actually use their data efficiently? Every organisation should not only be driven by data or the Internet of Things (IoT – a term we will use to cover gathering, processing and extracting value from data), but also ensure that it delivers measureable outcomes into their core business processes. Few can claim to be at this level of maturity and, if you are not one of them, our overview of the journey to managed enterprise IoT can help put you on the right path.

A true data-driven strategy can deliver benefits that range from tightly integrating customer care into product usage and performance to being able to remotely monitor and improve product (or service) performance to enabling new revenue streams.

We can divide the journey towards Managed enterprise IoT into three levels of maturity (that will be further explained with their own separate blogs) including the six sequential activities shown in the picture below:

Enabling the use case: exploring and solving business operational problems in minimum time to value with easily understandable business impact on people, process, places and products.

>> Benefits: Program / Portfolio – Business operations across all use cases

Managed Enterprise IoT: simplifying the complexity of IoT, which is now business critical, to be both agile and predictable as well as being proactive, prescriptive and automated to deliver positive and measurable benefits for your whole enterprise.

>> Benefits: Enterprise – IoT underpins whole business

Businesses are made up of people, processes, places, and products which need to create value – the fundamentals of business that have not changed with a data-driven economy. As businesses derive more and more of their revenue from data (and IoT), they are required to resolve its inherent challenges – enabling business value, managing the quantity of things and data, dealing with the complexity of the ecosystem and reducing security and privacy risks.

This is critical to enabling benefits for companies, to their customers, shareholders and the wider data-driven economy – the outcome of Managed enterprise IoT. Rather than taking big leaps from one maturity level to another, put in place a road-map at the start of your journey to Managed enterprise IoT (particularly as forward planning will save lots of time and effort later).

The companies I work with often ask, “Should we manufacture a solution in-house or purchase it from an external supplier?” These are my high level recommendations:

Nothing exists in a bubble; consider your long term strategy and competencies (taking into account value and performance). Approximately, core ones should be made, marginal bought, supporting could be either – core is defined as high value and high performance, marginal as low and low respectively.

Do not think that you can only make or buy; you can customize a solution that fits your needs. Build a level of extraction (i.e. non-native) above the layer at which you buy; this will enable you to commoditize everything below it, to future proof and ensure cost reductions and quality improvements.

Open source gives you access to a larger pool of innovation and can be a low cost way to experiment (enterprise versions offer greater predictability).

In the next post, I will explain the 1st level of maturity of this journey towards Managed enterprise IoT: ‘Enabling the use case’.

I would like to add a special thanks to Philip Griffiths (@ThePGriffiths). Philip was until recently, the strategic partner manager for the ATOS IoT practice and took the initiative to write this blog-series you are reading now.

“Whosoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times.” This phrase of Machiavelli Wikipedia perfectly aligns with how we should consider the Internet of Things (IoT) – the need to change our mindset regarding the IT industry and how we use data. Better analytics are now creating an amount of information which has never been obtained before; providing important insights into markets and consumers. The IoT can further enhance the business value extrapolated from data, and we find ourselves in the early phase of development of this new technology that will shape our vision of the world.

Now, imagine a company that distributes millions of sensors along its production chain in several factories, all sending data about machinery to a central location. On one hand, managers will have access to a large amount of data which can effectively contribute to help correct inefficiencies, and to create business value. McKinsey estimate that if policy makers and businesses get it right, linking the physical and digital worlds could generate up to $11.1 trillion a year in economic value by 2025. On the other hand, the data center involved would probably very quickly reach its processing capacity, as it would be overloaded with data and connections that are being pushed from the sensors. According to Gartner, it would not be technically and economically feasible to maintain every computing activity in a central location with the IoT.

The impact of the IoT

The IoT will have a huge influence on companies’ data center strategies, and the best option is likely to be creating a distributed data center infrastructure, installing smaller facilities close to the devices for local processing, with further aggregation in a central location. This creates a more flexible management system which can be adapted to changing requirements. The old logic of using a centralized data center to reduce costs and increase security is simply not compatible in the IoT era. However, any strategy is dependent on the smartness of the devices being used to filter data and avoid overloading the entire system to prevent inefficiencies.

The adoption of the IoT will likely lead to a profound reassessment of data management strategies within businesses, and aspects such as costs and the integration of new technology are hot topics for managers today. The IoT represents a great opportunity for creating smarter companies that are more responsive to market needs. It enhances capabilities that, decades ago, managers could barely imagine: real time analytics that allow for preemptive intervention to avoid potential errors.

Therefore, implementing IoT solutions is important to be able to create a tailored data management strategy, re-considering the role of the data center for a business. The IoT will likely speed up the transitional process to cloud-oriented infrastructure; companies in different sectors are already gradually running a larger part of their processes on hybrid cloud solutions. The cloud is an enabler of digital transformation which can enhance the potential of the entire infrastructure, and support in delivering better services.

A future for the traditional data center?

The advancement of IoT and cloud computing may lead to the reduction in the use of data centers by businesses, simply due to the potential level of scalability and flexibility that companies may need to attain. Clearly, security cannot be underestimated and companies need to maintain a robust infrastructure around their data. It is likely that data centers will gradually lose strategic importance for most businesses, however physical locations will still be needed as safe stations of reference in case of system failures.

IT managers need to begin thinking about the best approach to optimize and innovate their infrastructure, ensuring it doesn’t become quickly outdated in a fast moving environment, enabled by the IoT.

Disclosure: This post was previously published on Atos Ascent and was co-authored by Mr. Andrea Sorrentino (who wrote a significant part of the text below) – minor format and content edits have been applied to fit it to this website.

Today the manufacturing industry faces one of the biggest challenges in modern times: how to embrace the next industrial revolution. The technological disruption which has arisen from “Industry 4.0”, the current trend of automation and data exchange in manufacturing technologies, has drastically changed how we see the world today. Moreover, the highly competitive landscape poses urgent questions of change management that manufacturing companies need to address quickly.

Nowadays, in a more inter-connected world, companies need to adopt the right tools to get closer to the market and become more competitive. The manufacturing industry needs to adopt big data to innovate, to optimize their processes, and improve yields. But how should managers approach this technological revolution and work towards creating a smarter factory?

Machinery performance can now be measured with small sensors connected to the internet, monitoring where efficiency can be optimized. For example, workers will be able to foresee machinery malfunctioning, and intervene in a timely manner. Gartner’s latest forecast predicts 20.4 billion things will be connected by 2020, which will completely change the way we work in several sectors. In the meantime, machine-to-machine communication is fast becoming a reality, and the Internet of Things (IoT) represents only the first step in that process. In this post, I look at four ways in which managers in the manufacturing industry can exploit IoT solutions for commercial benefits:

1. Understand how your company can profit from IoT solutions

Industrial standards for IoT are still not clear, in part due to the wide range of flexible solutions that can be developed in any industry. Factory and operations managers need to define a series of objectives to understand how best they can benefit from connected devices. This is because while it is relatively easy to collect data, it is difficult to understand how to cluster it to avoid complexity in analysis. It is key to define first what type of data can be useful to increase efficiency, rather than trying to analyse huge amounts of data which is not necessarily relevant. By honing in on the aspects which will make the most difference to the business, in terms of profit, subsequent analysis becomes much simpler.

2. Clarify your security strategy

Security is a fundamental aspect to take into consideration when adopting any IIoT (The Industrial Internet of Things) solution. Consumers still hesitate when purchasing IoT products, in part due to safety and privacy concerns. Similarly, manufacturers are hesitant to adopt IoT solutions since data and app platforms can be subject to cyber-attacks as well. Operational processes and risks need to be coordinated around these safety issues, a topic Atos explored in their Journey 2020 report.

The IIoT is fundamentally changing the cyber-security landscape; the old logic of go-to-market quickly to gain market share over competitors does not apply anymore. Any device connected to the internet can become a weapon for hackers, and IT companies need to effectively secure their infrastructure before delivering to clients. Having real-time security analytics and a cyber-resilient system are essential when deploying IIoT solutions to protect against any potential attack.

3. Consider sustainability

Sooner rather than later, companies need to consider how they will ensure that their IoT solutions remains sustainable i.e. future proof. Their IoT strategy needs to define, among other things, what type and the expected amount of data they need and how to manage it effectively to minimize potential negative impacts. It is also crucial to understand how to manage potentially millions of connected devices, and how to build a scalable and reliable, distributed computing environment around the production factory.

Sustainability in the sense of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) also offers opportunities. It is currently one of the hottest topics in the manufacturing industry. The adoption of sustainable strategies is something many manufacturers are beginning to take into consideration, since brand reputation depends on companies working to reduce the level of emissions and waste they generate.

IIoT will enable the creation of what researchers have termed a ‘circular economy’; the concept that puts re-usability and recyclability at the center of any type of process. Through IIoT solutions, managers will be able to extend the lifespan of machinery, thus cutting energy costs. Therefore, the development of smart-factories would likely result in a more ecological manufacturing industry, thus drastically reducing the impact of industrial processes in the environment.

4. Get out of your comfort zone

The industry is still in an early stage when it comes to IIoT adoption, but some pioneers are taking steps to ensure they are future leaders of the industry 4.0 era. The opportunity is out there, and decision-makers need to act rapidly to advance in this next wave of technology change.

It is fundamental to assess your own capabilities and role within the IoT ecosystem: will you push data or will you pull data? In a push model, you need to look at the smartness of your devices and data platform. If you pull data you need to look at your data analytics capabilities so you know when to ask for data and what data you need. Companies cannot bear the risk connected to data management for the entire production chain, therefore, it is necessary to build a partner ecosystem of buyers and vendors that co-operate for creating secured, efficient and scalable end-to-end solutions, leading to real added value in the production chain.

Recently I started investigating and investing in Home Automation. I feel the market is readying itself for mainstream and some interesting products are now available. It started with me buying a set of Philips Hue light-bulbs, a motion sensor and a Raspberry Pi. Connecting these devices with the help of existing apps and some tinkering with open source ‘Home Assistant’ and ‘Home Bridge’ allowed me to create simple automation scenes and use Siri to set the lights in the living room and hallway.

This first success led me to think I could take the possibilities inside my house to the next level; I researched extensively possibilities of various Home Automation platforms. In Europe there are various systems available. In the end I decided for the Fibaro Home Center 2 system. Based on Z-Wave technology, which allows 2-way communications between central hub and device, with a mesh network to combat low connectivity situations it seemed the right choice. Fibaro also has a ‘Light’ version of this hub, but I wanted to have some serious strength running my IoT platform so opted for the strongest system. It also promised interconnection with my Hue, SONOS and (upcoming) Alexa systems, so I was really excited to get started.

Source: https://www.fibaro.com/en/compatibility/

It turned out to be a terrible disappointment.

Before I describe my activities that led me to the final conclusion, there are a few things to note:

There are 4 ways to access devices and sensors in the Fibaro system:

A simple panel that shows an on/off or volume/brightness slider.

Through a magic scene creator that works with simple colored boxes that allow you to do an IF…THEN scenario

A more complex colored boxes interface that allows more variables

The LUA programming language

Source: http://www.5smart.ru/page/kak-rabotaet-umnyy-dom

I researched everything, I have seen more YouTube videos than I care to remember and have seen more programming examples that I wished for. I took a quick course on LUA programming.

I am not stupid with DIY projects in house; electric cabling, switches, dimmers and wiring. Most of this stuff I have done in the past on my own. I understand the color coding of wires, the difference between Ground and Neutral and have had my fair share of accidentally touching a Live wire (at least once in a person’s live…).

Let me first give you an overview of my purchases from the local Domotica Shop in the Netherlands:

1 Fibaro Controller Home Center 2

3 x Fibaro Module Dimmer 2

1 x Fibaro Module Switch Single

1 x Fibaro Module Switch Double

btw: these things are not cheap so I really researched (at least so I thought)

Secondly I will go into the various activities I undertook to get this box running the things I wanted.

Connectivity with Philips Hue lights and sensors

As far as I have researched it, there is no out of the box support in Fibaro for Philips Hue. There is the possibility to download a virtual device component that will connect to the individual Hue lights. Unfortunately this means I was unable to address the Hue lights in the visual programming interface of the Fibaro (a colored block system) and can only address the lights through the programming language LUA. This was a major set-back as I was let to believe integration between Hue and Fibaro would work out-of-the-box.

The Hue sensors such as the motion sensors and dimmers are not accessible through the Fibaro; maybe they could be accessible through the LUA programming interface, but I found no evidence for that.

Instead of being able to address the Hue lights in the ‘Magic Scenes’ or the ‘colored boxes’ interface, I had to install virtual devices using the Philips CLIP API Debugger. This would give me the API Access code that could then be used to activate the virtual devices. After that the virtual devices would become accessible in other code, that I had to write for the scenes. Are you still there?

Due to the lack of access to the Hue sensors, I would have to rely on the Fibaro sensors, which I hoped not to (to be honest I knew upfront that the ‘rely-on-Hue-sensors-part was going to be tricky as they do not support the Z Wave protocol in use by Fibaro).

Conclusion: Could work, but would need a serious amount of manual programming

Connectivity with SONOS

I have 4 SONOS loudspeakers. 2 are connected in a stereo pair. One other is in the kitchen and one is upstairs in my study.

Source: https://www.fibaro.com/en/why-fibaro/

There was no out-of-the-box connectivity with the SONOS system. It required the download of a virtual device (remember those?). As a result I managed to connect to 1 SONOS loudspeaker. It became clear that I had to download a virtual device for every loudspeaker separately. After doing this I was able to start/stop the music and volume of 1 speaker. The others were not responsive. And the stereo-pair was nowhere to be found in the system. Moreover, if the one that worked had no active playlist, it would not do anything.

By now you will have guessed that no devices were easily accessible; all the work had to be done through the LUA programming language.

Conclusion: Could work, but would need a serious amount of manual programming.

Installation of Fibaro modules

So, as it turns out Fibaro on/off switches need power; makes sense right? As a result installing switches behind a light switch can only be done of the box behind the switch carries not only a live wire (brown), but also a neutral wire (blue). It turns out that that is not the case in my house. Maybe more modern houses have this or maybe in other countries, but my house is 28 years old and only has a brown (Live) and black (Switch) cable.

Luckily, Fibaro has a module called Dimmer 2, which can be installed if the neutral (blue) wire is absent. So all is well, no unfortunately not. The switch-boxes in the wall of my house are not deep enough for the combo of a light-switch and a Fibaro module. So I hunted the local DIY market for light switches with a very small footprint and with some clever wire maneuvering was able to fit everything, very snugly, into the switch-box. Following that I connected the module to the Fibaro controller and, voila, I could remotely operate the lights. Alas, the physical switch was not working anymore, which would really not make my wife very happy. I checked the wiring, looked at another 4 YouTube videos (warning, look at installation for “Dimmer 2”, otherwise you will get really confused).

Conclusion: Could work if your house is built to fit Fibaro or you do not mind some reconstruction of wall-mounted switch-boxes (including drilling new holes and putting in new wiring).

Conclusion and words of warning

I have no doubt that the Fibaro system will work, once you get the switches, dimmers and specific other Fibaro modules installed; but this fairyland only exists on the various Fibaro websites. No real life scenario worked for me. Existing wall-switches, existing Hue system and existing SONOS speakers could only be installed with great cost, either in time or with additional investments and serious physical changes in my house. I do not believe that house automation should go hand in hand with yielding a jackhammer to replace switch-boxes.

in conclusion, device-by-device:

SONOS – no out of the box support of a SONOS system – no visibility in the graphical scene creator

Hue Lights – no out of the box support of a SONOS system – no visibility in the graphical scene creator

Hue Sensors – no support

Fibaro Modules – not working in my electrical system

And a word of warning: the Fibaro website mentions interoperability with Apple HomeKit. This is only true for a very limited set of Fibaro modules/devices; a smart power-plug, a motion detector, a flood sensor and a door/window sensor.

So at the end of a week with not so much sleep and a lot of learning of new things, I concluded that this (rather expensive) set up was not for me and as a consequence I have requested the seller to take it all back; I hope they agree that this was a bust.

PS. I still have my Raspberry Pi running with Home Assistant and Home Bridge. I am very proud to show the Siri integration with the Philips HUE lights, the SONOS Speakers, the Honeywell EVO home heating system and the NEST smoke & CO2 detectors. At least some systems do work in my house, and at a fraction of the cost.